As its name suggests, the Media Manager is the place to keep track of and organize all your media files within folders and subfolders. You can use it to upload files, delete old material, or create new folders.
The interface within the Media Manager is graphical and similar to other file explorer programs you will have definitely used within a Windows environment.
Like any of the sections of the administration control panel, you can access the Media Manager either by:
You can switch your view of the files within the Media Manager to suit your preference, as both provide the same level of functionality:
The following screenshot illustrates the use of the thumbnail view:
The Folders section to the left of the Media Manager interface displays the site folders. Click one to open and reveal any subfolders within it.
Within your site there will most likely be a subfolder within the images folder called stories, that is, images | stories. This is generally where the site images will have been placed and is where the Image Upload button defaults to when you add an image to an Article. You can also create new folders in here to store additional media.
Using the Party People website, we have created a new article and now need to add an image that doesn’t fit in with the established folder structure.
It may be that after adding a new Section and/or Category, none of the existing image folder structures apply. Here we’ll create a new subfolder called glassware to accommodate the new material:
Now that we have the new glassware subfolder we can upload a new image to store in it using the Upload File tool.
While you may have your own images and videos to use on your website, if you are considering using another artist’s material and content, always ensure you have copyright permission or the license to do so in order to avoid breach of any copyright laws. You should refer to your local authority for full details.
Many website developers and owners regularly purchase and use stock photography, illustrations, and videos. If you choose to purchase any material for your site, ensure you are purchasing it with the right license, as there may be restrictions on its use even after paying for the material. This may, in fact, be a license fee and not a transfer of complete ownership. Sites such as http://www.istockphoto.com/license.php have a page dedicated to licensing agreements around purchasing their material.
Have you ever visited a website where a large image takes forever to download? Or the video takes forever to start playing? Chances are that you gave up and left the site.
While it doesn’t happen quite so much now, take care to avoid this wherever possible. As a general rule, the larger the file size, the longer it takes to download into the browser, and not all users of your website may have fast download speeds.
To ensure your images are downloaded as quickly as possible, ensure your files are formatted and compressed into as low a resolution version as possible (without losing the quality) and the dimensions of the videos displayed kept to minimum viewing sizes. There is a trade-off between quality of the image and download speed; compromise is the key here. Audio, video, and animation files can be referred to collectively as multimedia, especially when they are combined within a project.
Images come in a variety of file formats and some are smaller in size than others. There are other image file formats, but the following are often used within websites:
Remember the following when applying images to your website:
Having covered editing and adding text to an article, updating and/or adding new images or other media to your articles is easy too.
In this section, we’ll work on adding and deleting images and cover some general information on how they can work best for your site.
The File Upload tool within the Media Manager makes it easy to move your images from your computer into your website folders.
Now we have an image within the glassware folder, it’s ready to be used within anarticle. Note that the following screenshot presents the Details View.
You might find that as your website consumes more space on the server, you may have to delete some image files. However, be careful doing this, as you don’t get a warning! Ensure your site does not require the image anymore, as you will end up with a blank area with a red square in it where the image should be, and that looks unprofessional.
Using Thumbnail View within the Media Manager, select the checkbox under the image thumbnail or next to the filename. Click the red “x” icon next to it in order to immediately delete that file, as shown in the following screenshot. You can also use the Delete button in the contextual toolbar at the top right.
Rather than a single image, you might have an article with a Simple Image Gallery embedded within it that presents a selection of thumbnail images to the browser through the article. The gallery plugin parameters can be accessed through the Extensions | Plugins menu along the top of the administration interface. The following screenshot is an example of how one looks on the Party People website.
Using the Party People website, we’ll update this New Balloons in Stock Now! gallery applying the Balloons folder we made earlier. However, remember that the authors of this plugin recommend only 16 to 20 images per gallery.
To display the new images from a different folder in the article, we will need to access the article through which the gallery is presented:
{gallery}galleryNameIsHere{/gallery}
If the dimensions of the image gallery, such as the height and width, need to be changed, there are the following steps:
Note that your developer may have changed the name of the module when it was installed.
I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…
Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…
Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…
Key-takeaways: Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…
While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…
Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…